Current thoughts and directions in museum practice from around the world,
as selected by Julian Bickersteth.

Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Mobiles and museums - the next stage

The UK Museums Journal
latest edition devotes its Museum Practice section to exploring mobile phone usage in museums. This comes off the back of a
Fusion MA Mobile Survey which sought to assess how cultural organisations in
the UK
and US are using mobile technology to:

extend audience research

increase visitor engagement and participation

provide potential new revenue channels

The report is a vital litmus
test to my mind of where museum thinking is currently at or going to be shortly
on the use of mobiles. My takeaways are:

mobile usage in museums is going to expand commensurately with
the wider take up of smartphones (90% penetration by 2015 being talked about)

museums are managing many of their mobile programmesin house, i.e. they are being very hands-on

that said only 5% of UK museums surveyed had a developed
mobile technology strategy, i.e. nobody quite knows what they are doing

QR codes already top the list of mobile features and are set to
expand as fast as apps

revenue opportunities through social media or by allowing
purchase of online merchandise are very limited.

In summary the report
reflects a very fluid situation at present with everyone feeling their way, but
one where the role mobiles play in visitor access is only going to get greater
and that at speed. From the feedback I get, the most sought after feature is
going to be way finding, the bug bear of many a great US and European museum,
i.e. visitors get lost or don't explore the museum fully through fear of
getting lost. Analytical capacity of smartphones is a nice-to-have but not a
driving force.

So what comes out of the
Museums Journal articles?

On apps versus mobile
friendly sites, each have their benefits, with apps having the advantage of
operating independently without an internet connection, but mobile sites are
generally much cheaper to develop as they can draw on the website framework,
and they don't need Apple store approval or cross platform (Android, iOS etc)
development.

On the role of audio guides,
it is clear that buying and maintaining
devices is a thing of the past, and that visitors are going to use their own
phones or tablets.